Time’s up. Defund the CBC.
By Damien Kurek
Battle River-Crowfoot MP
The media landscape is changing, and it’s time to respond to this shift by defunding the increasingly irrelevant CBC. Backed by over $1 billion in Federal tax dollars, this inefficient behemoth competes against small and independent media outlets for viewers and advertising space, shows a clear political bias, and has programming that is increasingly not relevant to Canadians. These failings and increased irrelevance are all at the expense of hardworking Canadian taxpayers.
Many Canadians are struggling to pay bills, put food on the table, find affordable housing, and walk safely in their communities. Canadians deserve a government focused on reducing taxes, cutting costs, building homes, and addressing the root causes of crime. And the creative sector is one that Canada excels at, yet under the Liberals they are trying to control what “Canadian Content” is and push a particular version of Canada that fits their bias. There was a case to be made for CBC in the past, at a time when our large and growing country needed to be connected, both rural and urban, but with the changing media landscape CBC finds itself without viewers and without content that people want to watch. Cultural content that focuses on Canada, our people, and our history is valuable and important, but outside of some nostalgia for public broadcasting, it far extends beyond what CBC offers. This coupled with other Liberal censorship laws is making Canada a less free place for freedom of speech and expression.
Prime Minister Trudeau and his allies, including CBC President and CEO Catherine Tait, showcase the irrelevance and entitlement of the organization daily. Tait’s annual compensation ranges from $472,900 to $623,900. Yet, she claims the CBC is underfunded and must “stretch limited resources to meet our mandates.” Ironically, her version of “stretching resources” includes cutting around 800 jobs while at the same time distributing over $18 million in bonuses (labeled performance pay), while not meeting many of their performance mandates!
When questioned about these bonuses, Tait refused to disclose the recipients and refused to answer basic questions about her own compensation. The real question is not whether she received a bonus but how much she got even when the organization failed to meet basic objectives! Common sense would suggest that bonuses get paid when things are going well; not at CBC, where it seems they have a backwards approach to this. In fact, we recently saw that CBC-TV advertising revenue further plummeted by another 10% last year, with the latest Annual Report indicating a continued decline as TV audiences dwindle.
Just a year ago, it was reported that the CBC’s English-language television audience accounted for only 4.4% of the prime-time viewing market, down from 7.6% five years earlier. The CBC's inability to deliver programs that resonate with viewers, coupled with the trend of Canadians migrating to digital and streaming platforms, illustrates that the CBC is irrelevant to Canadians. In fact, when debating this very issue with former Heritage Minister, now Minister of the Environment, Steven Guibeault, a number of years ago, he bragged about some primetime shows that had recently won awards… to which I pointed out that they were produced by private studios and were most watched on other streaming platforms online. Effectively meaning that they would have been successful without the CBC and the massive taxpayer subsidies!
Conservative Party of Canada leader, Pierre Poilievre and our common-sense team of MPs is calling for the defunding of the CBC to save taxpayer dollars and promote a free and competitive broadcasting space in Canada. This change would allow Canadians to choose what they watch, allow creators to create content people want, enable media entities to thrive based on merit, and ensure that employees receive fair compensation for their performance. It’s time to reconsider the CBC’s outdated role in our media landscape and prioritize the needs of Canadians over big, bloated bureaucracy.